Two heads covered in black balaclavas. Eyes flat red, the colour of impersonal terror. Tongues pushing out: long and fleshy, grotesque, with a hint of the phallic. A blinding burst of sun between the two, the granite ledge beneath them uncomfortably over-exposed, the sky framing them a cloud-dotted, spring-like blue. Its everyday gentleness highlights the harshness of everything else it frames: tongues, eyes, masks, sun, stone.

Sasha Velichko’s photographs are staged performances of the absurd. Carefully composed, structured and restrained, they capture the violence of a world in which flowers become bombs, a forgotten television box becomes a crime, and speaking Belarusian in Belarus becomes an offense. Originally a scientist, Sasha describes herself as a researcher documenting a regime that rewrites reality on the go.

Since 1994, Alexander Lukashenko has ruled Belarus, his regime extending from the control of media, institutions and opposition into the control of public reality itself. Everyday actions – tea drinking, prayers, picking up children from school – are filtered through an arbitrary and cruel haze of suspicion. The accused are detained, fined and punished for what they are imagined to have been doing.

Lukashenko’s power lies not only in this ability to brutally impose an invented reality, but to invent one so arbitrary, capricious and untethered that it rivals AI hallucinations. The achievement of Sasha Velichko, working in exile, is to capture this absurdity not only at the level of the personal but as a structure of feeling, imagination and action that is deeply political.

Each core photograph – which depicts a scenario of the regime in action – is accompanied by an explanatory text of the event to which it responds. Directly next to it is a tight flock of smaller AI images generated from actual news headlines published on the same day. The headlines are savvily chosen, while the AI imaginary unleashed upon them results in the strangest distortions, associations, and figures whose humour and absurdity radically denaturalise both the headlines themselves and the political reality that produced them.

SASHA VELICHKO is a research-based artist working across photography, archive, installation, and new media. Forced to flee Belarus due to political persecution in 2021, she has focused her practice on exploring propaganda, post-truth, as well as collective and personal trauma. Velichko's work was nominated for FUTURES by Fotofestiwal kódz and awarded the Fotofestiwal Grant in 2026.

MARKHA VALENTA is a trans-Atlantic scholar working at the intersection of politics, anthropology, history, and religion. The work spans Europe, the United States and the Global South, exploring the Netherlands as a node in the world’s geopolitics of diversity, Muslims as a global minority, and the immorality of states. The child of an artist, Valenta works across academic and cultural fields.